The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  As he was about to leave, he saw her gold cigarette case on the divan, and snatched it as he went by. He tucked it into his inside pocket.

  Before the door, he stared at himself in the mirror and remembered the LifeMask. Dutifully, he went back for it. He pulled it on clumsily, one-handed, as he strode down the hall.

  In the shadow of the curtain he lingered, surveying the tearoom. A dozen or so people, mostly men, sat or lay on their sides in the room, each booth with its own efficient attendant. He couldn’t see everybody but recognized no one.

  A television screen had been lowered in the corner on his left. Some kind of CD-I program was displayed, a lined game board with black and white circles on it in clusters. He couldn’t tell who had the remote responder.

  Two women pushed through the curtains, and he stepped aside to let them pass. He saw Chikako then, just past the opposite doorway, standing at the bar. After making sure his mask was on straight, he stepped out, and, head low, started across the tearoom.

  He kept his eyes on her. She must have sensed him. She turned toward him, stuck her hands out and parted the drapes wide, rustling the palm tree, smiling broadly. She had a fresh red cigarette in her fingers.

  Her expression stiffened, eyes shifted, going wide.

  “No, Angel!” she cried and sprang at him. He stumbled back against a table in alarm. Instinct made him reach for the gun he no longer had. The doctors had removed it. His knuckles rapped against the gold case.

  Hand outstretched, Chikako Peat slammed past him. Her shoulder hit him hard enough to turn him. He saw, past her hand, the muzzle of the gun—black like the ones in the school—coming to bear on him. He stared into the eyes of the familiar, placid, blond face, and realization dropped through him like a cannonball.

  His own face, his assigned mask from the school, had come to kill him.

  The killer fired, and blood ripped out of Chikako’s hand. Two fingers and the cigarette were gone. She gasped. Someone else screamed. He tasted her blood on his lips.

  The maskface fired again, this time into her body. Her right arm swung back, slapping Angel’s head. He stumbled into the table again.

  The crowd dived for the floor, crouching in their booths. Tabletops flipped up to shield them. Silverware danced through the air. The third shot flung Chikako back into him. He wrapped his arms around her, trying to prop her up.

  Past her neck, he saw the gun swinging, the hole like an iris open wide, looking for the spot in him to bore into.

  Suddenly, she pushed off him, wrenching free of his grasp. She pounced on the killer. The gun fired. The bullet buzzed past his ear. Chikako and her adversary crashed against a booth, then into the nearest table, flipping it off its pedestal. Drinks and food flew like shrapnel, skittered, and shattered. She slapped at the charming electronic face, glimpsed Angel still there behind her, and screamed, “Get away, goddamit!” An awful, bloody gouge had torn her cheek.

  She stabbed with her lacquered nails into the LifeMask’s eyes. The false face flickered like a tired fluorescent bulb. The gun fired again. Her body bucked, her back tore open. Screaming in rage and pain, she hammered her fist into the gray mask.

  Someone took hold of Angel and yanked him away. He swung around, but did not recognize Mallee for a second. Her horror amplified his own numbness. She had the presence of mind to act. She shoved him through the curtains, dragged him out past the diners, crouching like mice under their tables. Out the front entrance. “Run and don’t stop,” she ordered.

  “Chikako—”

  “No chance. She’s dead. It was for you, you bastard, now go!” Another shot went off. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  A small crowd was gathering outside the door. They stared at him as at a cornered beast. He bolted, and they jumped aside, shrieking.

  Mallee slammed and bolted the door.

  ***

  Furiously, Mingo shoved the dead woman off him.

  She had been nearly impossible to kill, as if she had been wired up on drugs. He ought to have opened up on full automatic and leveled the place; but he’d thought it was going to go smoothly.

  He crawled to his feet and looked around. No one was about to come near him, but no doubt security was headed here right this minute. The mask, he could tell, had shorted out, useless, incommodious; but the cringing customers all would have seen—they would all recognize the face well enough to identify it. He could take that little satisfaction away with him.

  Painfully, he stepped over the corpse, then fled, limping, through the rear curtains, into the deeper reaches of Grofé’s. A few doors hung open, people looking out, some so disoriented that they still wore their virtual goggles. Many yanked their heads back in as he ran past. Some of them were naked, but their perversions did not interest Mingo at the moment. He’d memorized the club’s layout, where other exits lay.

  His left thigh burned each time he put the weight of his body on it. In the center of each flash of pain, he pictured Angel Rueda, dead and dismembered.

  That dimwit bullgod had actually changed sides, thrown in with the enemy! No corpse of Rueda’s and the damnable guard on duty shoots him. Well, it was all too much.

  He ought to have been in a hospital with a wound that severe—everybody told him that and he even agreed with the diagnosis; but he was going to finish this thing first, tonight. No more unexplained phenomena on the Moon, and no more mingling with the stinking, shit-covered proles. After this, Xau Dâu was going into retirement.

  Once he’d gone far enough, Mingo unlocked the mask and peeled it off. He tossed it aside as he ran. It still carried a code assigning it to Angel Rueda. That should finish him if nothing else did. Even Overcity security would know to hunt him down, provided Mingo didn’t get him first. God, but the man was slippery. Mingo was beginning to think he was hunting some kind of trickster.

  Mingo touched his face where it stung and found congealing blood on his fingertips. The Peat woman had shredded his cheek right below the eye. The tiniest bit higher and she would have torn out his eyeball. He smiled grimly, reliving the triumph of having silenced her. That leak had been patched permanently. There remained only Gansevoort to eliminate, which could wait until all the other loose ends had been fixed. Gansevoort—he had to laugh—they’d left the naive boob tied to a chair for six hours. Heaven keep him from honest men!

  Mingo slammed out the exit door, ignoring the alarm he set off. He glanced around immediately for any sign of Angel in the deserted corridor. Stranger things had happened, but not this time. He hurried along the alleyway.

  He asked himself where a man with no memory would run to. As an intellectual exercise, it intrigued him. Peat had obviously selected Grofé’s—that had been a simple enough puzzle to solve. This, now, would require more existential contemplation.

  Mingo straightened his jacket, tucked away the gun, and put on his dark glasses, then walked quickly but not obtrusively around the corner and into the main flow of late evening traffic. He dabbed gingerly with his scarf at the gouge in his cheek. From behind the tinted lenses, he stared intensely into people’s eyes, believing himself gifted with the power to read in their look any confusion or dismay that a running man would have left, as though he could peer into each retina and locate an image burned there.

  A team of security uniforms charged past, and most heads turned to watch them. Mingo pretended to rub at his eyelid.

  He could not refrain from a self-satisfied smirk. That whore had been nothing other than a cool gadfly, yet she had succeeded in squeezing the company for years with her threat of “private files.” No doubt there would be some fallout as a result of her demise. Naughty picture disks or some such. A few heads would roll. People in power could not afford to exercise their perversions—when would they ever learn? It made the work of people like himself so much more difficult. This way, at least, the equation balanced out. SC might lose some executive material, but they would gain in the end.

  “If you’d only listened to me …�
�� he muttered.

  After a few minutes’ search, he concluded that Angel had fled the twenty-third floor. There weren’t enough people about to conceal him.

  Mingo took an escalator to the nearest skyway level—the eighteenth—and hailed a pedicab. “Locust Walk Tower,” he said. The cyclist eyed him suspiciously but as quickly started pedaling.

  Overcity security resided in Locust Walk. He would use their facilities to track his prey while their people sorted out the mess he had just left in Grofé's. If they were pleasant, he might even help them to connect the one with the other.

  A large group exited from a theater court. Through the crowd he glimpsed a LifeMask and went for his pistol only to discover, as the cab rolled past, that it was someone apparently crippled, probably disfigured, walking via a CNS-stimulating prosthesis.

  He clucked his tongue, tucked the gun away, and contemplated how accidents happened every day. Angel Rueda’s being alive was thus far a series of enormous accidents—who could have predicted it?

  Security would turn up Rueda, however. There was no place in the Overcity he could go that their lenses weren’t scanning right now. If only the bastard had kept his original mask, Mingo could have tracked him anywhere on the planet. If only he hadn’t had to go deal with that errant skimmer pilot on the Moon while Rueda was fitted with a cortical calotte, he would have had the stupid surgeon place a tracking device inside it. He hadn’t really expected that he would ever need it, and had let the matter drop. Accidents again. Nothing but accidents. Too many accidents and none in his favor.

  He took solace in the hope that Rueda would lead him now to the third party, the uninvited guest—the woman who had aided in the escape from ICS-IV, who had seemingly evaporated afterward. She wasn’t one of the twitchers nor one of the staff. No one who’d survived had any idea who she was. There would have been a record of her visit if the rioting children hadn’t destroyed every active disk in the place. There ought to have been security images of her, only that fool Gansevoort had come along and used his clout to escort her around the checkpoint. Accidents.

  She was a ghost, this woman, a phantom. Mingo yearned to meet her. Just once.

  Chapter Eighteen: Underworld Blues

  It was raining when he reached the plaza—a steady downpour washing the more recent human egesta into dark crevices and drains. Where hamburgers and cha gio had recently been consumed under Mingo’s governance, Angel lingered on a chipped stone bench and gathered his frayed wits.

  Most certainly, Chikako Peat was dead. A few hours ago they had been of one body; and the memory brought to him her perfume, the scent of those herbal smokes, the voice that mocked him while extending comfort, that hexagram tattoo from her former employ: “Hsien,” she’d identified it. “Wooing.” Her voice, full of irony, rang out so sharp and clear in his mind that he could not help gazing up to see her, a fata morgana riding the hiss of the rain in the dark, lost to him.

  He knew he should to make contact with Lyell but had no idea where to begin. The Overcity worked by tacit rules, and he was conspicuous however he went. No place offered him sanctuary. He had seen the looks in their eyes as he fled: they would all remember him.

  Wearily, he got up and plashed across the broken concrete. His arm throbbed. The skin of his biceps was hot to the touch. All the energy that had attended him with Chikako had swirled away like this rain into the drains. He wished he had been able to sleep alongside her. He wished he possessed more medicine, one more shot to see him through his escape. Without it, he must go as far as he could. Mingo would come after him.

  Ahead, past a row of huge pots rooting black dead trees, the plaza narrowed. He passed into a canyon beneath a crisscross of skywalks. Another plaza opened to him, this one encircling the Gothic City Hall building and lit by garish sodium lights. A security checkpoint was installed on the far side. He could see a few figures inside a conveyance tube beyond it, riding an escalator up to the skywalks. He hung back against the sealed ground floor walls of the buildings that circled City Hall plaza. He was a solitary figure in shadows cast by the walkways, cut by the lights. The rain helped, keeping the guards inside their gate. At that distance it erased identity: the guards nothing but faceless ciphers.

  Edging along, he caught sight of his own lambent reflection in a polished buttress. Where the rain had spattered the mask, it appeared to have holes in it. Splotches covered the top of his head like some fungus or the exposed bones of his skull. Across the crown, the mesh of the mask emerged clearly. He glanced toward the checkpoint but no one was there. No one saw him.

  Safely around City Hall, he set off more quickly down Market Street to the east. Not far along the broad and broken, debris-strewn avenue, the main cluster of towers fell away, until only a single strip of looming skyscrapers remained. They stretched east almost to the river. Nearby, much older buildings, many abandoned or inhabited on the ground floor only, filled the spaces between ancient streets. Dazzlingly lighted fast-food kiosks surrounded the tower exits off Market and Tenth Street, representative of every conceivable variety of meal. He stared at the twirling orange bun with the hideous grin on its cartoon face and recalled Chikako’s remark linking food and ScumberCorp.

  He shied away from the kiosks. Many things he was, but hungry wasn’t one of them.

  The number of people grew the farther he walked. Nocturnal nomads roamed the streets in search of nothing.

  He passed graffiti-coated entrances to old underground rail lines, but did not understand what they were; otherwise he might have vanished right then into the sanctuary they offered. But no one else was approaching them, and he stayed away.

  Thinking that Mingo might find him on so broad an avenue, he turned left at the next street. There, in the dark, he discovered ahead a wonderfully strange arch. It stood in the street, like the gate to a mythical realm. Brightly colored figures, monstrous heads and Chinese characters adorned the twin pillars and the crosspieces. It was all the more strange in that the buildings to each side of it were crumbling edifices. Who maintained this arch, and why? He could not imagine, but its very incongruity kept him from venturing further. Whatever dwelled in that darkened domain of shop fronts might have erected the arch as a warning rather than any kind of welcome to would-be trespassers. He must look elsewhere for sanctuary.

  Turning, he noticed a rusted and graffiti-adorned green street sign: “Arch Street.” A joke?

  A passerby stumbled blindly against him while he stood there looking, grumbled at him before shuffling on. Angel forgot about arches and headed away from the solitary figure.

  He walked east upon a surface of flattened, dissolving trash made slick by the rain. Crushed atomizer bulbs skittered underfoot like tiny deformed crustaceans. No one passing seemed to mind the debris. People close by watched him, but most looked fearfully away if he turned his gaze on them and gave him a wide berth. Those few who stared longer did so with mad eyes, seeing something of their own making in his softly glowing visage. He glanced past them, at store windows to either side. Against the darkness of the street, the mask was a bobbing will o’the wisp, a phantom light.

  As he progressed eastward, each row of decaying buildings that went by stripped another layer off time, each ushered him deeper into the city’s past, toward the Delaware River and the eldest stratum. He did not want to be trapped against the river

  Many of the historical sites had been seized by squatters and converted into seedy shops that clung like barnacles to the city’s keel: grocers who grew food and herbs in scrubby backyard plots; cheap teahouses where locally grown opium was smoked and Balinese puppets cast their grotesquely flexing shadows across sex-stained sheets; verminous flophouses for those who had moved up from lower levels or fallen from grace. People lined one sidewalk, awaiting the next available room in a four-story flophouse. He kept to the far side of the street. The flophouse offered him nothing, either. Angel needed to descend to places where scouted shades could mask him far better than his dissolving el
ectronic façade.

  The buildings stopped abruptly. An open space lay dead ahead, caught in the sodium glare of lights atop a high wall to the north—that would be the wall enclosing the fabled Vine Street docks, he figured.

  To his left, as far as he could see, stretched a conflux of boxes. A bizarre living fortress. It over-spilled a red-brick retaining wall, down a few steps and across the street. Rows of contiguous boxes covered the walks on both sides, the broad avenue ahead. A few scattered maple trees stuck out of the mass on his left, silhouetted, leafless, against the lights.

  A layered murmur of conversation rolled like ocean waves upon the air, cresting with shouts and howls and peals of laughter. He could smell woodsmoke, and things less pleasing.

  He crossed the street to where a crooked sign hanging off a Mile-a-Minute-devoured brick wall announced that he was entering “Judge Lewis Quadrangle.” Beneath it someone had scrawled“The Judge is Out.” He wandered in beside the wall.

  There must have been hundreds of people milling about in the cramped lanes that separated the hovels. A cheesy background odor of unchecked bacteria, of bad meat, assailed him each time he squeezed past one of them. Others, squatting on the ground in their boxes, watched him silently with unreadable, feral eyes.

  He discovered an opening in the brick wall to his right. Through it he could see a line of lamps, and he made his way toward them.

  The lamps were short antique streetlights on black poles. They glowed wanly, hardly more spectacular than his LifeMask. Their light held a certain magic he could not explain—perhaps it was just that they worked. Moths fluttered obsessively around them. The steady rain glistened like gems, falling past. He took in the concourse around the lamps and noticed that some of the people were naked. They stood shamelessly on the bricks, their arms reaching for the sky as if in supplication; a few, armed with soap, lathered themselves furiously and then passed the soap to other eager hands. Others, possibly more timid, rubbed the soap over their clothes. They all gave him defiant once-overs when they caught him staring.